Conventional smart home solutions provide an automatic notification to a smartphone when a visitor is detected at a home entrance. Sensors, such as Passive Infra-red (PIR), and computer vision can be used to detect a person or an animal within a field of view of a security camera. Upon receiving a notification, a user can turn on the smartphone, select a corresponding application, and connect to the outdoor smart home solution device to respond to the person at the entrance.
There are at least two problems with the conventional implementations. One problem is an inherent latency of the notification. Similar to a cell phone text message, notification latency can range from 1 second to over 10 minutes. Generally, the notification signal goes through the smart home solution device cloud server first, then to a smartphone proprietary server (i.e., Apple server for iPhones, Google server for Android phones, etc.) and then to the service provider carrier (i.e., a cellular service provider) to deliver the notification to the smartphone of the user. The quality of service (QoS) implemented by the Apple/Android server and/or service provider carrier is generally low. When servers are busy, the notifications can be delayed. Further delays to the user receiving the notification can be an amount of time for the user to connect the smartphone to the smart home solution device. Because of the delays, users may not be able to prevent bad events from happening at the home. The users may get a good recording of the bad events.
Another problem is that the number of notifications per day can be very high when there is a lot of events detected by the smart home solution. There may be traffic in the field of vision of the device or the environment (i.e., trees, wind, cloud shadows etc.) may cause the sensors to produce a lot of false alarms. Too many false notifications can lead to a “cry wolf” problem and actual bad events may be ignored by the user.
It would be desirable to implement automatic greetings by outdoor IP security cameras.